National Day of Civic Hacking 2016
The Theme: Revitalizing Priority Neighborhoods
Sacramento is an economically and culturally diverse city that can also lay claim to being the most integrated city in the country. Residents from all walks of life live and work in close proximity to each other and share, to a certain extent, the ups and downs of the city together. However, Sacramento’s integration, including its economic integration, is far from complete. While the city’s fortunes have risen in recent years, the benefits of this rise have not permeated every community. At the same time, the city’s primary tool for promoting the development of its disadvantaged communities--redevelopment--was stripped by the state in recent years.
The Opportunity
You can help Sacramento revitalize its priority neighborhoods by creating:
- Tools to help decisionmakers better understand, visualize, and prioritize the challenges faced by the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in Sacramento.
- Streamlined processes for creating new businesses that provide jobs in these communities.
- Better ways to connect disadvantaged residents, including homeless residents, with services they need.
- Methods that help residents communicate to decisionmakers their needs, ideas, and desires for their communities.
The Challenges
Participants can take part in a number of official national and state challenges that align with the theme of Revitalizing Priority Neighborhoods.
- Promise Zone Challenge: Serving as the central organizing challenge for the day, the White House's Promise Zone Challenge asks teams to visualize data to help tell the story of Promise Zones.
- Opportunity Project Challenge: This challenge asks teams to use Census data to increase opportunity in disadvantaged communities.
- Food Insecurity Challenge: This challenge, from the State of California, asks teams to create an actionable picture of food insecurity in communities and build solutions to tackle the issue.
- Community Health Needs and Priorities Challenge: This challenge, also from the State of California, asks teams to develop a tool to help communities create a dialogue with government around health and wellbeing needs and priorities.
The Resources
Geographies
Promise Zone: Sacramento is one of only 13 communities nationwide with a federally-designated Promise Zone. This defined area of the city and county has a 34% poverty rate, a 19% unemployment rate, and a life expectancy 7 years shorter than the rest of Sacramento County. The federal government and Code for America are promoting the visualization of Promise Zone data as an NDoCH challenge.
- Information on Sacramento’s Promise Zone
- Promise Zone Geography - see "Shapefile" and "geoJSON" folders in this repository
Building Healthy Communities: The California Endowment has chosen an area of South Sacramento, which overlaps with the Promise Zone, as one of 14 communities statewide on which it is focusing a decade-long effort to improve health outcomes.
- Sacramento’s Building Healthy Communities area
- BHC Geography - see "Shapefile" and "geoJSON" folders in this repository
General Datasets
City of Sacramento Open Data: The City of Sacramento has begun a concerted effort to make its data available for use by the broader community. Several of the available datasets could be helpful in providing information about the targeted communities.
US Census and The Opportunity Project: The US Census offers downloadable data and an API to access datasets that can provide a wealth of information about communities, and is encouraging the creation of data-based apps through The Opportunity Project.
Regional Opportunity Index: The UC Davis Center for Regional Change has created a regional opportunity index at the census tract level that combines numerous characteristics of the people and places that make up a community.
Data.gov: The federal government has been placing ever-increasing amounts of data on its central open data portal.
Health
CHHS Open Data Portal: The California Health and Human Services Agency maintains an open data portal containing numerous datasets regarding the overall health and health services available to Californians.
Housing
HUD Datasets: The US Department of Housing and Urban Development provides a number of datasets that can provide information about the health and economic wellbeing of a community.
Environment
CalEnviroScreen: The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) has created a tool to identify communities that are disproportionately burdened by pollution. The CalEnviroScreen score is based on 19 individual measures of pollution and population vulnerability at the census tract level.